Horde

We need to resist.       It rushes from my lips
outside the club       despite the impossibility
of we       its presumptions       the fracture
across its cloud which makes group chat
a hailstorm of full stops.      Some of us have six legs
some two hundred.      Plenty can’t stand each other.
Rainbows       the physicist explains       don’t exist

outside the eye as objects.        When you move
toward one        it slips away.        When one trembles
it’s you that’s shivering.         We are built from coat hangers
storm light        and whatever we carry in our pockets.
The drag queen’s wedding dress of tissues and receipts
is highly flammable.       It’s not enough for two queers
to have both been shut inside      the sly apparatus of shame

to have both waited like umbrellas       for practised hands
to slide along the sticks of our bodies
so our heads spring open.      Not everyone wants to be
the beetle that wears        exclamation marks on its wings.
It’s not a collective dream         the western where cowboys
whip out glue guns       and fix each other badly so they have
to do it again.       We’ve been spat out of too many we’s

each loneliness a different colour.      Anyway I still pray
to the god of pavements       we can dance together
beside a police car’s flashing disco of blue.
And there are always the lies       of memory.
My first Pride was twenty years back       but the crowd
is still here      and I feel it      we share a craving
greedy commas       with our tongues hanging out

ready to scoop up everyone.